1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to computer systems, and more specifically relates to the generation of a virtual appliance such as an open virtualization appliance (OVA) that may be deployed in a cloud computing environment.
2. Background Art
Cloud computing has become an area of emphasis for software and website providers. Cloud computing is a general term for presenting computation, software, data access, and storage services in a manner that the end-user has no knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. Cloud computing relies heavily on virtualized resources. Thus, for software to be deployed in a cloud computing environment, the software is generally described as running on one or more virtual servers. When the user executes the software, the user has no idea the location or number of physical servers that deliver the virtualized software.
The term “virtual appliance” has been used to describe a virtual software image designed to run on a virtualization platform. A typical virtual appliance includes a group of master disk images and metadata describing the virtual systems needed to boot and run the software stack stored in the disk images. A virtual appliance is usually constructed to host a single software application. A virtual appliance thus represents a new way of deploying network software applications. The disk images and metadata describing the virtual appliance may be provided in Open Virtualization Format (OVF). OVF is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances to be run by a hypervisor. An OVF package generally consists of several files (virtual systems disk images and an OVF file describing the virtual system) placed in one directory. The OVF package may be compressed as a single file known as an Open Virtualization Appliance (OVA).
Known methods for constructing a virtual appliance required a user to provide or specify both the functional information as well as the virtualization information to create the virtual appliance. This requires the user to have substantial expertise not only in the software application, but in virtualization as well. The prior art provides no way for a user with functional expertise for software to construct a virtual appliance without also having the virtualization expertise. As a result, the only users who currently create virtual appliances are those who have detailed expertise and knowledge regarding both the software to be deployed and virtualization. This greatly limits the people who can construct virtual appliances.